


Flowers and Swords

by GlassRain



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Language Barrier, M/M, Magic Swords, Meet-Cute, POV Katsuki Yuuri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 21:54:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10908195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassRain/pseuds/GlassRain
Summary: Yuuri has always admired the magical knights from the foreign country of Soviannis. So when he finally gets a job working around them, the first thing he does is . . . drop a branch on one. At least Sir Viktor doesn't hold it against him.(a fluffy fantasy Leif & Thorn AU)





	Flowers and Swords

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sorta-kinda fusion with Leif & Thorn: http://leifandthorn.com/
> 
> I changed things so the main countries are more like Russia and Japan, and Yuuri and Viktor have backstories that fit their characters. The rest of the plot and worldbuilding is based on what's in the comic. For example this world has no lingua franca like what English is in the show, so they each have to speak the other's language. Or at least . . . try to.

My name is Yuuri Katsuki, and ever since I was a child I wanted to be a knight.

Not just any knight, though! It's embarrassing for someone from Japanheim, because we're so proud of our country, but I was enchanted by the knights from Soviannis. My parents recorded the crystal broadcasts of them doing demonstrations, and my best friend Yuuko and I would try to be that graceful, playing with sticks and pretending they were magic swords.

I actually tried out for the Japanheim Defense Force when I got out of school. They told me I was in good physical shape, and I passed the security check, but because of my anxiety I didn't qualify.

That probably means I couldn't be a Soviannic knight either, right? Because their swords come from inside themselves. I don't really understand it, but I think you need to be totally confident in yourself before you draw it out.

I ended up studying horticulture instead. Partly because I like flowers and partly because it's a job you can do everywhere. Every country has gardens and trees that need tending.

Yuuko tried out for a government job too, not on the defense force, but in the diplomatic corps. (Which is really funny if you knew her as a kid. Don't say that to her face.) We took the same Sovannic language classes in school, and that's how she ended up working at the Japanese embassy in Soviannis.

Well, at some point they had an opening for a gardening job, and Yuuko gave them my name.

It's an incredible place to work. The lawns and gardens are full of beautiful plants from home. And the grounds are huge, because that's where we all live, too. They had to wall off one big patch of land where Japanese magitech can work. I don't think Yuuko's triplets would know what to do if their smartcrystals didn't connect.

I knew the Embassy would have work for me to do as long as I wanted to be there. Maybe I would even get lucky and run into a knight along the way.

 

I was up on a ladder to prune one of the trees, a big flowering one that grows by the wall around the grounds, when my shears caught on some kind of knot in the wood. They still cut through the branch, but they jerked in such a way that the cut-off piece went bouncing over the top of the wall.

All this didn't seem too bad until I heard an "ouch!" from the sidewalk.

"S-sorry!" I called, too flustered to remember to say it in Soviannic, and leaned over the wall.

There was a whole group of people down on the pavement. Most of them dressed like knights, plus one skinny blonde magical boy, in a black costume with pink and red flames. When they saw me, the blonde boy pointed and started yelling. It was too fast for me to catch any of the words . . . and from how loud and angry he was, I bet they weren't the vocabulary you get taught in school anyway.

"[Something something], Yuri," said one of the knights soothingly. I did a double-take. How did he know my name?!

He kept talking, and I realized he was focused on the magical boy, not me. It must have been another word I didn't know how to translate. Or, there's a Soviannic name that sounds like "yuuri", so maybe it was that.

As my heart stopped pounding with embarrassment, I had a chance to look at the knight more closely. And that's when I realized -- it was Sir Viktor Nikiforov! I'd seen him on broadcasts and he was even more beautiful in person. Silky silver hair, crystalline blue eyes, and when he shifted from one leg to the other I got a feeling he could snap a board in half with just his thighs.

He looked up and me and rubbed his head a bit. I think he was the one I hit with the branch. But he was smiling like it didn't bother him at all.

"Sorry," I repeated, in Soviannic this time.

Sir Viktor answered in Japanese. His accent was heavy, but not so much that I couldn't understand him. "It is okay! Next time, be more careful!"

He led the rest of the knights and the magical boy away then, so he probably didn't see me turn as pink as the flowers.

 

"Axel! Come inside!" I called from the door overlooking the Embassy patio. I already had Loop and Lutz by the hands, but that was all the hands I had, and the last of Yuuko's triplets was still at the far end of the patio looking through the bushes. Even though the sun had gone down and the lamplight barely reached that far.

"Not right now, Yuuri!" yelled Axel. "I gotta find Salchow!"

All the girls had pets, but Lutz's goldfish Ina Bauer couldn't leave her bowl, and Loop's turtle Spiral wasn't fast enough to lose track of. Only Salchow, a ferret, could go missing at inconvenient times. And right now was sure inconvenient -- we had been warned to go inside, because a dangerous animal had gotten loose on the grounds.

"He's probably hiding!" I called, adding hopefully, "In a nice safe place."

"But what if it's not safe?" chimed in Loop.

"Yeah, he might get eaten!" added Lutz.

I sighed. One of the triplets could be wrangled, maybe even two, but going up against all three was a losing fight. "If I promise to go get Salchow, will you come inside?"

It worked -- it got Axel to go in -- but now I had to keep my promise and go searching around the gardens. In the dark. If I didn't know the grounds so well I probably would've ended up going in circles.

If I didn't know the grounds so well I probably would have missed the shadow that was moving the wrong way.

I scrambled right up the nearest tree so fast my glasses almost fell off, and just in time, with the black-furred creature snapping at my heels. It looked like a monstrous dog with blazing red eyes and claws that left deep gouges in the trunk.

"Go away!" I yelled, clinging to the trunk. I didn't expect it to work, but what else was there to try? "Shoo! Go on!"

The dog-monster snarled and clawed at the tree some more.

I was about to break off a branch, throw it, and yell _fetch_ , when I heard an answering voice with a thick accent: "Do you need help?"

Sir Viktor stepped out from a row of bushes. His hair almost glowed in the moonlight.

I couldn't remember the Soviannic word for _monster_ , so I called "Beware of dog!" instead.

"You can maybe drop a branch on it?" said Viktor, in halting but friendly Japanese.

Was he teasing? Was he . . . _flirting?_ At a time like this? Was he not taking it seriously at all? Because that would be bad, especially since the monster had noticed him, and was abandoning its pursuit of me to stalk toward him . . .

Viktor put a hand to his chest.

A blue-violet light glowed around his heart, and his fingers closed around the hilt of a sword, inlaid with gold filigree and violet gems. Then he did this little _flourish_ , and he _tossed his hair_ as he drew out the blade, and it was so effortlessly graceful that I almost fell out of the tree.

The dog-monster wasn't impressed at all. With a growl it leaped for his throat. Viktor spun out of the way, every motion as fluid and controlled as a dancer, and slashed with the sword. I didn't even see which stroke was the killing one. The next thing I knew the beast was lying in pieces on the grass.

Viktor stepped neatly over the body and came over, blade still faintly glittering. "Hello again!" he said, smiling that calm smile. "What is your name?"

"Y-Yuuri," I stammered.

"Yuri? I know a Yuri. Is a good name. I am Viktor."

"I know," I said without thinking.

His eyebrows went up slightly, but he didn't ask, just extended an arm to beckon me out of the tree. "Is okay now. Come down to me, Yuuri."

 

Salchow turned out to be hiding in a bush under one of the windows, not twenty feet from where Axel had been looking. When Yuuko found out, she gave the triplets an earful. "You could have gotten Yuuri killed! What were you thinking? And be more careful with your pets!"

After they had been shooed off to bed, she came down on me. "You seriously got saved by Viktor Nikiforov? I knew he was stationed around here, but never _talked_ to him. What was he like? Tell me everything!"

"He looks exactly as amazing in person," I said, a bit giddy with leftover adrenaline. "I told him -- I could barely remember how to speak Japanese, let alone anything else, but I think he got the idea -- told him how I wanted to be a knight when I was young, and I'd seen him on broadcasts, and I was a fan."

I never thought I'd have the nerve to talk like that to someone. If the situation hadn't thrown us together, I would have been too shy to even go up to Sir Viktor in the first place. And then suddenly he was helping me down from a tree and it all spilled out.

"It turns out he . . . teases, a lot," I told Yuuko. "Not in a mean way. I think teasing is his way of being friendly."

Viktor was the kind of person who could make a joke like _you could drop a branch on it_ , then put up a serious fight to save your life, then switch right back to saying things like _if you want someone to coach you in being a knight, call me._ It could be disorienting. But once you saw that it was, underneath, a sign that he basically liked you . . . it was nice.

Maybe I would get very, _very_ lucky, and see him again some time.


End file.
